


In which the pack plays monopoly (no, really)

by VirtualCarrot (Kaoro)



Series: Teen Wolf tumblr ficlets [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Everybody Lives, Gen, M/M, Monopoly (Board Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:53:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22868185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaoro/pseuds/VirtualCarrot
Summary: Once things settle down, they find other ways to spice up their lives. Wherein "other ways" means "monopoly", Stiles is a little shit, Scott cheats (out of love), Boyd is incorruptible, Lydia is judgemental and Derek has feelings.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Series: Teen Wolf tumblr ficlets [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643803
Kudos: 145





	In which the pack plays monopoly (no, really)

By the time they finally wrap up the alpha pack situation, with debatable degrees of success, Derek has been living in the beat-up loft for about a year. The place is huge, cold and drafty, and what little furniture he ever had was made even scarcer by the destruction that took place inside. He contemplates leaving — the flat, Beacon Hills, the state, the country — going far away and starting anew somewhere else. Anywhere else.

In the end, he starts picking up the debris strewn all over the place.

*

The pack — the packs — throw him a house-warming party. Stiles compliments him on graduating from burnt-out ruins and abandoned train stations to badly renovated lofts, tells him he’ll go a long way in life and gifts him with a battered second-hand monopoly game so he can improve his real estate even further.

The board game is missing three tokens and one fourth of its dollar bills, and the most beneficial cards of the battered deck are scrupulously cornered so that they’re easier to spot.

They don’t get to play it that day. Derek shelves it carefully in plain sight in the living room, and if he finds his eyes drawn to it every now and then in the early mornings, smirking sleepily over a bowl of dry cereal, no one has to know.

*

“There aren’t enough pieces,” Derek repeats for the umpteenth time since Erica and Scott started forging dollar bills with half-dried felt-tip pens and torn notebook pages.

In the kitchenette, Stiles takes a break from his sandwich-making to throw his hands up at the drama. He slaps two slices of bread together with a sticky noise and proceeds to lick off the peanut butter left on the round-ended knife. It’s vile. It’s absolutely vile, Derek doesn’t have the _words_.

The knife lands in the sink with a clatter that has Stiles air punching in victory. He walks to the counter, picks an abandoned beer cap, digs into a bag from which he produces an uncooked farfalle and holds both cap and bow-tie pasta out triumphantly.

“Here, have your tokens.”

Derek eyes them dubiously, crosses his arms and tries not to smile. “We need one more.”

Stiles groans in aggravation. Scott takes pity on him and waves his pen to grab their attention.

“I’ll use the pen’s cap.”

“It’ll dry without it!” Derek grumbles, looking alarmed.

Lydia uncaps an abandoned pen and rubs the inefficient tip against Scott’s cheek. She levels Derek with a look of such deep condescension that he walks over to the kitchenette and peers into the fridge to hide.

*

As per tradition, the Hales used to gather in their living room every Sunday or so. 

The dining table would be cleaned of its remaining crumbs, the books and pens that inevitably found their way to it during the day would be put away, someone would bring snacks from the kitchen, and a board game would be set. One family activity to ensure group cohesion.

The Hales were an extremely competitive family. It was chaos.

*

There’s a fight about the tokens — of course there’s a fight about the tokens — until Derek snaps, “First come, first served.” 

He isn’t even finished speaking that they all take hold of a piece and he’s left with the farfalle. Allison looks delighted with her horse, Cora tries to act indifferent about the wheelbarrow and Stiles gloats over his race car.

Derek quickly switches the farfalle for the race car.

“Just deal the banknotes,” he cuts in before Stiles can complain.

Except Stiles doesn’t seem honored to be the banker and scowls even harder. 

Lydia rolls her eyes. “I’ll do it. Anyone else will make a mess of it.”

So they play.

*

Laura used to be the worst of them. Her gloating abilities were only surpassed by uncle Peter’s, but then Peter would usually be happy enough to just smirk from his armchair and sip some brandy with the smuggest heavy-lidded look he could muster.

Laura would spend the rest of the day ordering the younger children around, petulantly arguing whenever someone asked her to do just about anything. If the game had been particularly nail-biting, her attitude was known to last for days. She once carried on until the following weekend at which point the whole family rallied together and made sure to subject her to a crushing defeat as punishment.

When she lost, though…

Talia was a passive aggressive loser. For all that she was eleven years old Cora was a bawler, fat crocodile tears rolling down her cheeks. Laura… Laura got _angry._

There were screaming matches.

*

The third time Scott pointedly doesn’t notice that Allison is on his property, too busy pretending to count his money, Stiles gags and attempts to kick him under the table. He misses. Boyd glares at him over the tabletop and the pile of money he‘s been casually hoarding, and Allison kisses Scott’s cheek. Lydia sighs, goes back to her book on quantum mechanics and only looks up in order to offer Isaac a loan when he hesitates over his next purchase.

Stiles makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. “You’re not even playing!”

“I’m the bank. The bank loans money.”

Derek glares at his token as if holding it responsible for his own lack of management skills.

*

Out of them all, Derek’s father used to be the most agreeable loser. They usually gave him a wide berth of at least half an hour after he had won a game, just to make sure, but mostly he looked bewildered at the surrounding chaos and took on the role of peacemaker. 

Derek had only ever seen his father’s patience waver when faced with Peter’s self-assurance. Talia had had forty years of experience to learn how to deal with her brother; the rest of them were sadly lacking in the department.

For his part, Derek used to be a tolerable winner. Sure, he would beam and smirk and preen, but he knew how to tone it down. It actually mellowed him, somehow.

He has never learned how to deal with loss, though.

*

Three squares of doom stand between Derek and a more charitable part of the board. There’s a hotel, a tax, and a really, really expensive house, and Isaac is already staring at it with a greedy glint to his eyes, ready to reap the benefits.

Derek hates everything.

He shrugs to himself, tries not to hunch, and rolls the dice. He blinks briefly when the first one lands on two, and when he opens his eyes he is tempted to close them back again forever. The second die gives all inclinations of coming to a still on number one. And ruin him.

Then the table lurches with a grating sound and it falls over. Stiles lets out a string of curses, pushes his chair away, and rubs his knee with a wince.

“Seriously, what’s your damage?” Cora sneers, because Stiles is a fungus that has yet to grow on her.

Stiles frowns, tests his leg. “I had a cramp, okay? I was uncrossing my legs, the table’s too low. It attacked me.”

Erica picks up the die with a smirk and lobs it for Derek to catch. By his side Stiles mumbles something ominous under his breath, drags the chair closer to the table and absently picks at his jeans just over the bruised knee. 

Scott makes sure to meet Stiles’ eyes, glances at Allison, looks all too pointedly at Derek, and leans over with a grin. “Pot, kettle…”

Stiles crosses his arms, slumps low in his seat, and scowls. “Shut up.“

Derek ignores it all. He rolls the dice, moves his piece and breathes in relief. He’s safe.

For now.

*

From as long as he can remember, Derek has always taken defeat as a personal failure.

He used to be inconsolable for hours, sniffling and swallowing back tears. When he couldn’t quite hold them in he would slip back into his bedroom, hunch into a corner, and cry his little heart out. Eventually Talia decided they would no longer play games where there was one lonely loser, preferring those that praised victory instead of those that vilified loss. It helped. A little.

Still, little Derek sometimes felt the need to be on his own in the dark of his room where no one could see his tears.

*

For some reason Stiles seems determined to get to Scott by harassing Allison, who’s so amused by Scott’s indignation on her behalf that she can‘t fuel her irritation for long. Stiles holds out a hand with one of his most obnoxious grins, wiggling his fingers, so she glares and hands over a few bills from the depressingly thin pile of money in front of her. Scott offers to falsify some money and beat Stiles up — at Mario Kart — later in the evening for her. She grins.

Derek holds back a smile, fails — he can feel it growing lopsided on his face, can feel Stiles staring — and rolls the dice. He hears Stiles’ breath hitch by his side.

Boyd raises an eyebrow expectantly at him and Derek shrugs. He can’t pay, that much is obvious. He hands over his last property card — Oriental Avenue, if you must know — and rubs his empty hands. Stiles gestures wildly beside him.

“No, no, wait, what? Lydia can give you a loan.”

Lydia raises an eyebrow — “Can she?” — and glares at him for daring to offer her banking services without consulting her. He holds her gaze. 

Derek rolls his eyes and cuffs him on the back of his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. Carry on.”

Stiles’ eyes flash full of something, almost too fast to see, before he looks away to watch Erica roll the dice and move her piece. The game picks up again. Derek sniffs at his mug, makes a face at the smell of stale, cold coffee. Wraps his hand around the cool crackled ceramic. He nudges Stiles with his foot under the table, once, twice, before Stiles deigns to react to it in spite of his sulk, pressing back in annoyance. It’s no surprise, really: irritation is their mother tongue.

He hovers his free hand over Stiles’ knee and palms it carefully, like an apology or something more, something that makes Stiles finally turn to glance at him. Derek thinks that befriending Lydia has taught him not to shove his expectations at people and try and mold them into fitting them, because his face is open, inquiring, but not asking something of Derek. It looks like he’s asking about him instead. It feels freeing, not having any expectation to meet, not having to twist and fight himself to become someone else. Probably because when they met Stiles didn’t bother expecting much from him at all, and what little he did Derek never delivered, so he quickly stopped. And that thought should sadden him, except Derek really didn’t give a damn about Stiles then either, and they got to know each other through facts and not ideals and somehow that feels more meaningful.

He feels the brush of skin against the back of his hand, hesitant, before a palm settles there, warm and surprisingly wide. He snatches it without a warning and Stiles struggles for a short moment, wary and only half playful before he unwinds, and laces their fingers together. Derek squeezes their hands this shy of pain because he wants it to be known that he doesn’t want to let go. 

In the background, Cora is arguing with Boyd over the tax she has to pay and really, she should know better, Boyd is incorruptible. He nods along with her arguments, waiting for the moment she’ll take a break to breathe so he can blankly reiterate the exact same demand from a few minutes before. Ad nauseam. Until he is given his dues. 

Her eyes half-lidded with contentment and sporting an offensively lazy smile, Erica doesn’t even try to hide her smugness at the weakness of Cora‘s bargain. Derek has given up trying to understand the dynamics between Cora and Erica whenever Boyd comes up, because firstly, he doesn‘t want to know, and secondly, he‘s very happy that it‘s none of his business, thank you.

He lets go of Stiles’ hand, braces himself on his knee and pushes up as he stands, pressing a quick kiss to Stiles’ temple on the way. He leaves a cacophony of shouts behind him and hides his smirk into his cold mug as he ambles to the kitchen under the pretext of a refill. This time when he makes sure he’s alone it’s not to cry but so he can smile freely to himself.

He doesn’t really feel like he lost anyway.


End file.
